


The Price of Survival

by alSaqr



Category: The Lovecraft Investigations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:09:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27912049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alSaqr/pseuds/alSaqr
Summary: Kennedy tries to put her life together.Contains major spoilers for the finale of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” You have been warned.
Relationships: Kennedy Fisher/Matthew Heawood
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5





	The Price of Survival

Kennedy Fisher dreamed about Matthew Heawood a lot, after his disappearance.

She dreamed that he would walk in her apartment door one day with his spare key, and tell her off for not looking after her plants as well as she should have. (They had fallen by the wayside, as she tried to learn everything she could about Pleasant Green, and how to get Matt back.) She dreamed that she had slept in, and that he was waiting for her in the studio with a coffee just how she liked it and his smile that could cheer her up in a heartbeat. She dreamed that he was lying beside her, and that they had both said all of the things that they never got to say, and that none of this esoteric bullshit had never happened. And then she would wake up, and there would be no Matt, and there would still be withered plants, and the coffee wouldn’t taste quite as good, and she still wouldn’t have told him she loved him.

She texted him, daily. As if - if she was persistent enough, desperate enough - one day he would reply. He never did. She texted Eleanor Peck, too, trying to get her to talk about what had happened. (Did she even want Eleanor to respond? The audio recording on Matt’s computer, or Parker calling her ‘Mary’, set Kennedy’s teeth on edge. Had _anyone_ been truthful, other than Matt?!)

And she tried to get through to the Department of Works the same way Matt had and get Parker to get in touch, until someone left a rather threatening voicemail on the office phone and she decided she’d have to wait for Parker to turn up and complicate things again. Nobody she _wanted_ to talk to would - or could - get back to her and it seemed as though everyone unimportant was determined to bother her.

The police wanted to know about Matt’s disappearance, and Alice’s death. Slide wanted her to just _talk_ to him and get things off her chest. Fans were asking about the future of the podcast, and if it had all been a stunt to boost their hits. The business email had become a mess of comments that hid the important things about finances and rent that she had to actually force herself to try and read. All she wanted to do was drink herself into a stupor and wait for Matt to come home; and she didn’t know if he even _could._

One thing and one thing alone kept her mind from unravelling and going the way of Zaphod Allen and Dr Willet and all the other crazies who’d seen what she’d seen. Kennedy _had_ to believe that Matt was still alive. That wherever he was he was trying just as hard to get back to her as she was to bring him home. To even _consider_ anything else would be giving up, and she knew that if she did it was a hole she would never crawl out of.

Matt was her best friend, her better half, a piece of her soul. She felt his absence as keenly as a knife in her chest, that only sank deeper with every day he was missing. _This is depression,_ she would tell herself, knowing that she should speak to a psychiatrist about everything. Matt had always told her she should. But there was only one doctor in the world who would understand what she was talking about, and he was as mad as a sack of badgers.

Besides, she had a suspicion that secure mental institutes tended to frown on members of the public asking their inmates to psychoanalyze them.

And so she read, and she researched, and she drained the bank and set up a GoFundMe to try and keep the investigation going. Some obsessed fans somehow got #MatthewLives trending on Twitter and the donations came pouring in and she kept on searching for some clue, _any_ clue, that would tell her how to get Matt back. Obed Marsh or Casey or Dr Allen or whatever the fuck he was called continued to stay under the radar and at least nobody seemed to be trying to kill her. But the radio silence was deafening and infuriating and there were no threads to pull and no flags to plant.

And then there was so much they hadn’t even begun to understand! The mi-go. The magic mushrooms in Innsmouth. The mutants she’d seen in Innsmouth, and why they’d just… disappeared. The angel in the marble. Alice’s murder. Mary Larimie. The static on the radio recordings. It was all one big mess of crazy with no arrows pointing to a solution. There were people who _did_ know how to summon the Old Ones and maybe bring back Pleasant Green, but could it even happen in her lifetime? And was she willing to pay the price to ask the bastards who had used Matt as bait to get to her, just to get him back? Would the Department stop her? Was Matt worth the whole world’s destruction.

Of course he was. But nobody else would see it the way she did.

Pleasant Green was gone again and Matthew Heawood with it, and there was nothing she could do about it.


End file.
